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Malthus was right!

Now and then across the centuries, powerful voices have warned that human activity would overwhelm the earth’s resources. The Cassandras always proved wrong. Each time, there were new resources to discover,
new technologies to propel growth.

Today the old fears are back.

Leave on one side the typical misreading of the Cassandra legend: Cassandra’s problem wasn’t that she was wrong. On the contrary, she was always right; her curse was that nobody would believe her. Statements
like this are deeply unfair to Parson Malthus. The fact is that Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era.

Sumerian peasants in the 30th century BC lived on the edge of subsistence; so did French peasants in the 18th century AD. Throughout history population growth had always managed to cancel out any sustained gains in
the standard of living, just as Malthus said.

It was only with the industrial revolution that we finally escaped from the trap (if we did — for all we know, 35th-century historians will view the period 1800-2020 or so as a temporary aberration).

Was Malthus just unlucky? No. The same forces that made the industrial revolution possible — above all, the spirit of inquiry and rationality — also led to the birth of analytical economics. There probably
couldn’t have been a Malthus until the world was on the verge of becoming non-Malthusian.

Dr, Krugman, sorry to inform you, but we don’t live in a world led by rational thought. Rationalism is now playing a supporting role in soviety not lead one. The triumph of postmodernism is realy the return
of romanticism (aka intuitive thinking). Books by Jacoby (the Age of American Unreason) and Gore (The Assualt on Reason) describe the situation very well.

we are on the brink of outstripping our resources even though answers stand in front of us self-interest of the Oil industry and military industrial complex have us interfering in areas of the world with milinium
old religious conflicts.

not tht Jon Steward had a guest on the other day that said that 50% of the world’s disease is passed on through the water supply couple with what is stated to be in our water.

I wonder if there is an implicit effort for population control.

while aids and cancer are worth while diseases to cure there are millions dying of diseases that can be cured

and you just have to wonder with the conflicts and diseases out there it used for the

Malthusian tenet

that given a set of circumstances that one group of people will rip open the belly’s of others to get a scrap of food to paraphrase.

The forces that made the industrial revolution possible – above all – were not ‘the spirit of inquiry and rationality’ – please – they were coal and oil.

Try to imagine the industrial revolution, or even modernity at all without coal and oil. Now, understand that coal and oil are finite resources, and at the rate we are using them we are about halfway through.

The 1800 – 2020 period is indeed an aberration – one of an overabundance of cheap energy . The future will look a lot more like the Malthusian past.

By the way – who says things are so great now? All the riches are hoarded and thousands starve on this planet every day. If this is paradise, get ready for disappointment.

I beg to differ Paul, Malthus is absolutely correct! There is no mathematics in existence, nor technology in the future, that can provide increasing, or even the same, physical resources to a growing population
living on a planet with diminishing resources.

Ask Paul Ehrlich if he doesn’t feel like Cassandra. Mr. Ehrlich was wrong in his forcast of the symptoms of overpopulation, (what economist can fault him for this), but the concept was right on the money.
The symptoms are not starvation, but global warming, economic crises, and war. I share Mr. Ehrlich’s feelings. For 40 years I have only supported politicians that I thought might be able to begin to comprehend
the inevitable conclusion that the cancer of overpopulation will lead to.

As long as most of the worlds population was denied an increase in their living standards (India, China) we could increase ours by consuming an unfair share of resources. But that game is now over. Never again will
America enjoy a standard of living that involves consuming an increasing amount of physical resources.

The conservatives who have a solid record about being factually wrong on every important issue of the day, are once again wrong on the most important. Paul, you have a big microphone, you can start a meaningful
conversation.

There is a second sine qua non for the industrial revolution – high-BTU hydrocarbon fuels, initially in the form of coal. Without this companion, genius would have languished once the peat and charcoal disappeared.

I will vote for whichever candidate promises to make Paul Krugman SecTreas. Not just offering him the job, but actually physically dragging him to DC and ensconcing him in the office – if that is what is
necessary.

It’s a given that 1800-20xx will be a temporary aberration. Exponential growth is by definition unsubstainable. Scale our present growth out far enough, and you’ll find the earth covered in a layer
of human bodies expanding at the speed of light. Kind of hard to see that working out well in practice.

The alternative scenario is for mankind in general to become sufficiently well off for our overall population growth to stop (as it has in all industrialized nations). Unfortunately, the impact of that level of
consumption on our resources also seems unsustainable…

Based on an estimate of the total mass of humans compared to the total biomass on Earth, it will take only eight more doublings of the human population for the mass of humans to exceed the total biomass of the Earth.
If population growth were to slow to 1% per year, those eight doublings would take 576 years.

The Wall Street Journal has a simply bizarre view on reality. Malthus was right. We have been lucky for a while, but no technology can save us from the long term cost of growth.

In 2000, investment banker Matthew Simmons reviewed the prediction of “limits to Growth” and found that they were remarkably accurate up to that point. Eight years ago, he summarized his review this
way.

“Is there time to begin the thoughtful work which the Club of Rome hoped would take place post 1972? I would hope so. But, another 10 years of neglect to these profound issues will probably leave any satisfying
solutions too late to make a difference. In hindsight, The Club of Rome turned out to be right. We simply wasted 30 important years by ignoring this work.”

The world did not become “non-Malthusian” at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the unexpected and massive influx of energy from fossil fuels suddenly changed the resource base of the planet.
The biological limits Malthus predicted still applied but the carrying capacity of the planet was suddenly much larger than it was because we were much more effective at exploiting those resources. With the
impending decline in fossil fuel availability our carrying capacity will revert back to something lower and we will understand that, no matter what we choose to believe, humans are still subject to the laws
of nature.

Malthus lived in 18th century France. That is key for his misconception as the French peasant population was effectively extorted for the absolutists aggrandissement and spoil of expensive buildings of Louis XIV,XV
and XVI.

Had he lived in the 18th century Dutch Republic, England or Scotland he would not have made this observation.

The prime reason was that mainly due to the Reformation, when Calvinist Protestants started reading the Bible for themselves and translations in the common language were made, literacy was already nearing 100% even
among the Dutch peasant population in the 17th century. English, but in particular Scottish literacy also rapidly moved upwards.

Although the spirit of inquiry and rationality are relevant, it is literacy, in particular also among women, that strongly tempers the number of children she gets. This fact has also been observed multiple times
in 20th century Africa. Raise female literacy and fertility plunges.

Also in the 17th century Dutch Republic insurances to save for retirement were invented, another massive economic surpressor of the incentive to breed for the old days.

And as a last remark, the 17th century institution of the Bank of Amsterdam introduced a hard coin mentality, which stimulated safe savings for the old day and the ‘Rasphuis’ and ‘Spinhuis’
social workplaces for poor male and female beggars, were established in the 17th century.

It is clear that Malthus was able to discover his law just after absolutist France ended, in the Dutch Republic or England he would have faced the societal deck stacked against him, in particular as Dutch agriculture
was already insufficient to feed the cities and grain was imported from the Baltics for centuries.

I suspect the Journal is flogging Malthus because they are trying to inflate a new speculative bubble in commodities, and justify the lunacy of diverting corn production to make ethanol-based fuels instead of demanding
that the administration get serious about conservation and efficiency.

Perhaps the better frame is Verhulst’s logistic model: growth constrained by limits of resources, rather than Malthus’ unrestricted exponential. Then the relevant question becomes ‘what is the
carrying capacity?’ I guess doomsday makes more titillating copy.

The problem with predicting these sorts of things is that they inevitably go on longer than one can believe possible, disproving predictions of their end and turning those who warn of impending bursting into Cassandras.
This applies to bubbles and growth both. For example, you wrote 2.5 years ago “There are signs that the housing market either has peaked already or soon will.” Well, you were right that it would
peak, but “already or soon will” was a tad early. Of course, it should have burst then, but it didn’t. No limits to growth is in fact one of the great myths of our age. It is just as silly
as the myths of antiquity, and yet we believe it.

Consider any example of exponential growth in a finite world. Exponentials collide with the finite with all the subtlety of a race car impacting a concrete pillar, and yet until it does, people have a way of believing
it will go on forever. This is aided by periodic warnings of the end of exponential growth being proved wrong. Some MIT researchers wrote a book about the collision of exponentials with the finite in 1970. For
some reason that book is remembered as having made predictions that turned out wrong. It turns out that the book made essentially no predictions (I recently skimmed it), but rather just explored how “if
it is not one exponential that gets you in the end, it is the other thing that does”. I would say that the book is almost reviled today, as its title brings a sneer to people’s face (oh yes, it
was titled Limits to Growth and the scenarios they explored tended to get unhappy around 2070, but they weren’t even predictions).

You’ve heard the gedanken about Judas’ 30 pieces of silver invested at just 3%? In 2007 that account would have held $718,314,274,384,456,567,085,601,264 (and 71 cents, but who’s counting).
That is approximately $108,161,704,045,392,828 for every person on Earth. Now tell me growth can go on forever.

Considering the growing scarcity of resources that make the escape from the trap possible, along with the huge growth in human population made possible by the industrial revolution, well, I think aberration is looking
more and more likely.

The little lilies in the huge lily pond double every day. The second last day the pond is only half full. But the last day the pond is suddenly completely full and all the lilies die.

Sure economic growth is “limitless”, even if the growth isnt a neat doubling but comes in waves. Read Grant McCracken on consumerism and check out the style section of the NYtimes. Problem is our lily
pond is finite. The petrie dish has a lid on it.

It is instructive that you choose Sumerian peasants and not !Kung to serve as an example. The “edge of subsistence” business applies only to “civilized” peoples, that is people who engage
in domesticated grain agriculture. Those societies are invariably hierarchical, and the peasant population at the bottom of the pyramid do indeed live at edge of subsistence.

The bulk of human existence has been in usufruct, hunter-gather societies, where the ecological footprint was smaller, and famine non-existent.

“The fact is that Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era.”

And in some parts of the world, even now, arguably. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse, the chapter on Rwanda brings up a chillingly Malthusian (but mostly neglected) aspect to the social crisis leading up to the
genocide. Recently, some suggest that similar scenarios might play out in Kenya — after all, most of the factors blamed for the recent violence have been present for generations, the big change has been
in population. The Great Divergence has left quite a few population centers behind, and if global warming plus resource depletion threatens far more losers than winners, we could see a significant reconvergence
on Malthusian conditions in much of the world.